Foundation: the perfect match

The bonus of being a beauty journalist is having an overwhelming amount of foundations to try at my leisure. But before landing the dream job, I experienced many a colour crisis. These usually involved me standing in Boots for about an hour, covering myself in various foundation swatches that couldn't be any further from my actual skin tone, before grabbing one up in frustration and realising it made me look a little bit dead, or a little bit grubby as soon as I got it home and put it on my face.

Apparently, 78% of women would change their current foundation if they could find a better colour match, and three leading beauty brands have decided to tackle this problem head on.

No7 took the techie approach of creating a unique device that reads the exact colour values of your skin, before recommending your best No7 match. This new Foundation Match Service is available now at No7 counters and the range has also expanded its shade palette after measuring the skin colour of over 2000 British women.

Maybelline have put all their energy into a new range called FitMe. It includes 12 shades of foundation divided into three different shade families; 100, 200 and 300. They've even gone a step further by launching six FitMe concealers available in the same shade families, as well as six powders, with the promise that at least two of these will match your foundation and concealer perfectly. It's as easy as 1-2-3!

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L'Oréal Paris asked their Facebook followers to pick what they considered their closest match from a gallery of foundation shades on Facebook. Some of them were genuine L'Oréal Paris True Match shades (if you chose one of these you were sent the product), but others were red herrings that didn't exist within the range. The top two non-existing shades that were most frequently clicked on were then made available - these were Golden Beige and Cappuccino.